Radar-enabled ambient backscatter communication

In this work, we exploit the radar clutter (i.e., the ensemble of echoes generated by the terrain and/or the surrounding objects in response to the signal emitted by a radar transmitter) as a carrier signal to enable an ambient basckscatter communication from a source (tag) to a destination (reader). Upon deriving a convenient signal model, we exploit the fact that the radar clutter is periodic over time scales shorter than the coherence time of the environment, because so is the radar excitation, to distinguish the message sent by the tag from the superimposed ambient interference. In particular, we propose two encoding/decoding schemes that do not require any coordination with the radar transmitter or knowledge of the radar waveform. Different tradeoffs in terms of transmission rate and error probability can be obtained upon changing the control signal driving the tag switch or the adopted encoding rule; also, multiple tags can be accommodated with either a sourced or an unsourced multiple access strategy.